Spooky Electric

The End(s) of Daze : Judgement Day, 1984 :

Purple Lightening + Storm Clouds + Sheena Easton Hair + Cuban Heels

= Camile the Chameleon : Good Evening!

"Vey ehm I Drippings Wiz Goo...?"

Spooky Electric came along, and then we all did a bunch of Ecstasy & Viagra, one thing let to another....

.....some years later stories started to emerge about Tuesday December 1st, 1987...

...Somewhere that night he decided against it’s release....

...The decision appeared to be made after experiencing some heavy hallucinations when using the drug Ecstasy...

In what he has called a vision the letters :

G O D 

[ NOTE : "G O D" Not " J E H O V A H " ]

were hovering over a field.....

...He also didn’t want this album to be his legacy in case he died after the release.....

[Well, of course he was going to die at some point after the release.... isn't he...?]

" MILLIONS NOW LIVING MAY NEVER DIE "

PLEASE DON'T BUY THE BLACK ALBUM. I'M SORRY

“Camille set out to silence his critics. No longer daring - his enemies laughed. No longer glam, his funk is half-assed... 

Tuesday came. Blue Tuesday. His canvas full, and lying on the table, Camille mustered all the hate that he was able. Hate 4 the ones who ever doubted his game. Hate 4 the ones who ever doubted his name.

Tis nobody funkier -- let the Black Album fly. Spooky Electric was talking, Camille started 2 cry. Tricked.

A fool he had been. In the lowest utmostest. 

He had allowed the dark side of him 2 create something evil. 

2 Nigs United 4 West Compton. 

Camille and his ego. Bob George. 

Why? 

Spooky Electric must die.”

"So let’s kiss our dark sides; let’s f**k our dark sides. 

Get him down there where he belongs. 

And he can tell us stuff. 

Y’know, that thing’s useful."

Vince Foster

Vince Foster from Spike EP on Vimeo.

FOSTERGATE

by James R. Norman [Resigned from Forbes because this story was spiked.]

"Was White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster selling US secrets to Israel?
The CIA suspects he was."
TWO weeks before his death on July 20, 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster went into a deep funk. The official cause of death, given by former Independent Counsel Robert Fiske Jr. (who was later replaced by Kenneth Starr), was suicide driven by depression over, among other things, several newspaper editorials. But Vince Foster had a much bigger and darker reason to be seriously burned out. He had just learned he was under investigation for espionage.

Outrageous? To say the least. But a lengthy investigation has located over a dozen sources with connections to the intelligence community who confirm a shocking story of money laundering and espionage connected to the highest levels of the White House. Without grants of immunity, the sources risk going to prison for violation of the National Security Act. Virtually all have demanded anonymity.

According to a veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative close to the Foster investigation, Foster's first indication of trouble came when he inquired about his coded bank account at Banca Della Svizzera Italiana in Chiasso, Switzerland and found the account empty. Foster was shocked to learn from the bank that someone using his secret authorization code had withdrawn all $2.73 million he had stashed there and had moved it to, of all places, the U.S. Treasury.

Then, according to credit card records reviewed by a private investigator who has revealed them, Foster canceled the two-day round-trip TWA and Swiss Air plane tickets to Geneva he had purchased on his American Express card through the White House travel office on July 1.

Discreetly he began asking what was afoot, says the CIA source, confirming that someone in the White House tipped him off. It was bad news. The CIA had Foster under serious investigation for leaking high-security secrets to the State of Israel.

For months, a small cadre of CIA computer hackers known as the Fifth Column, armed with a Cray supercomputer, had been monitoring Foster's Swiss account. They had located it by tracking money flows from various Israeli government accounts after finding Foster's name while secretly snooping
through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad. Then by snooping through the bank files, they gathered all the information needed to withdraw the money.

Foster was just one of the first of scores of high level U.S. political figures to thus have their secret Swiss accounts looted of illicit funds, according to both this veteran CIA source and a separate source in another intelligence agency. Over the past two years, they say, more than $2 billion has been swept out of offshore bank accounts belonging to figures connected to the U.S. government with nary a peep from the victims or their banks. The claim that Foster and other U.S. figures have had offshore accounts has been confirmed by a separate high-ranking CIA source and another in the Department of Justice.

Various sources, some of them controversial, have contributed other pieces to this puzzle. Whatever their motivations, those sources have proven remarkably consistent. Their stories jibe well with known facts and offer a most plausible explanation for Foster's mysterious depression. It would also explain Washing-ton's determined effort to dismiss the Foster affair as a tragic but simple suicide.

Vince Foster a spy? Actually, it is much worse than that, if the CIA's suspicions are confirmed by the ongoing foreign counterintelligence probe. He would have been an invaluable double agent with potential access to not only high-level political information, but also to sensitive code, encryption and data transmission secrets, the stuff by which modern war is won or lost. That is because for many years, according to nine separate current and former U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials, Foster had been a behind-the-scenes manager of a key support company in one of the
biggest, most secretive spy efforts on record, the silent surveillance of banking transactions both here and abroad.

This bank snooping effort began in earnest soon after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. Its primary aim was to track the money behind international terrorist groups and soon came to be dubbed, "Follow the money", according to the originator of the program Norman A. Bailey. Now a
private Washington consultant on international banking, Bailey was an economist and Reagan advisor on the National Security Counsel. It was Bailey's idea to begin using powerful new computer and electronic eavesdropping technologies then emerging to let the intelligence community monitor the previously confidential flow of bank wire transfers.

This was no small task; more than $1 trillion a day moves through New York alone.

 Bailey, himself constrained by the National Security Act, claims he doesn't know exactly how the data was collected. But he confirms that within a few years (of 1981) The National Security Agency (NSA), the signals intelligence arm of the government, had begun vacuuming up mountains of data by listening in on bank wire traffic. It became a joint effort of several Western governments with the Israelis playing a leading role, since they were the main targets of terrorism.

Other intelligence experts say the flow of bits and bytes was captured by various means; from simply tapping phone lines to implanting customized chips in bank computers to store up and periodically "burst-transmit" data, to a passing van, or low-flying "sig-int" or signals intelligence satellite. Another part of the problem was to get the world's banks to standardize their data so that it could be easily analyzed. And that brings up to PROMIS, powerful tracking software developed for the U.S. Government and then further enhanced by a little company called Inslaw Inc.

PROMIS stands for Prosecutor's Management Information Systems and was designed to manage legal cases. In 1982, just as Bailey's follow-the-money effort was gaining steam, the Reagan Justice Department eagerly snapped up Inslaw's newest version of PROMIS. But the government refused to pay the $6 million owed for it, claiming part of the contract was not fulfilled. Inslaw, forced into Chapter 11 reorganization, and nearly driven to quick liquidation by the government and its former partner AT&T, hotly denied that claim. Ultimately, a bankruptcy judge ruled the government stole the PROMIS software by "trickery, fraud and deceit."

Why PROMIS? Because it was adaptable. Besides tracking legal cases, it could be easily customized to track anything from computer chip design to complex monetary transactions. It was especially useful for tracking criminals or just plain political dissidents. Inslaw claims the software was eventually illegally sold to as many as 50 countries for use by their police, military or intelligence agencies, including such bloody regimes as Guatemala, South Africa and Iraq (before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait). Profits on these sales, Inslaw claims, went mainly into the private pockets of Republican political cronies in the 1980s, including Reagan confidante Barl Brain, former part-owner of UPI and FNN.

Among the biggest profiteers on PROMIS, according to the 1992 book by former Israeli anti-terrorism staffer Ari Ben-Menaseche, was former British publisher Bob Maxwell. On behalf of the Israelis, Maxwell aggressively marketed a doctored version of PROMIS equipped with one or more "back doors" to allow an outsider to tap into the user's data base without leaving an audit trail. In fact, it may have been such rigged programs that allowed noted Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard, from his computer terminal at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, to download vast amounts of top secret U.S. nuclear weapons and code data in the mid-1980s.

According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI counterintelli-gence report, Maxwell was apparently allowed to sell two copies of PROMIS back to the U.S. weapons labs at Sandia and Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a hugely inflated price of $87 million. That would have allowed Pollard, if he was using the rigged program, to obtain U.S. missile targeting data long before Israel had its own satellite capability, thus making it a real nuclear threat to the Soviet Union. Pollard was convicted of espionage and sentenced in 1986 to life imprisonment. U.S. officials have vehemently opposed efforts to gain his early release.

Maxwell, according to Ben-Menaseche and nine other sources, was also selling pirated versions of PROMIS to major world banks for use in their wire transfer rooms to track the blizzard of numbers, authorization codes and confirmations required on each wire transaction. Don't expect any banks to admit running PROMIS software. They probably now know it was pilfered. But they readily took it both because it was the best tracking software available at the time and because the U.S. government was tacitly leaning on them to go along with the surveillance effort or face regulatory reprisals or prosecution on money laundering charges. With the widespread adoption of PROMIS, the data became standardized and much easier to analyze by the NSA.

It took some effort to install and support PROMIS in the banking industry. That's where Vince Foster came in. Sources say that since at least the late 1970s, Foster had been a silent, behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf of the NSA for a small Little Rock, Ark., bank data processing company. Its name was Systematics Inc., launched in 1967 and funded and controlled for most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, a 1946 Naval Academy graduate along with Jimmy Carter. Foster was one of Stephens' trusted deal makers at the Rose Law Firm, where he was partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webster Hubbell and William Kennedy (whose father was a Systematics director). Hubbell also played an overseer role at Systematics for the NSA for some years according to intelligence sources.

Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its founding, sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret that there were billions of dollars moving around in "black" accounts - from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and other countries to paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine CIA drug dealing (such as at Mena, Arkansas). Having taken over the computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an "out-sourced" supplier of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction, out of view of bank regulators and even the banks themselves. In short, it became cyber-money.

One man who uncovered the link between Systematics, Foster and covert money movements from arms and drugs was Bob Bickel, who was an undercover Customs investigator in the 1980s. "We found Systematics was often a conduit for the funds" in arms and drug transactions, says Bickel, now living in Texas: "They were the money changers." His story is corroborated by a former CIA employee who says it was well known within the agency in the late 1970s that Foster was involved with Systematics in covert money management.

Another source is Michael Ricoposciuto, former research director of the covert arms operation at California's tiny Cabazon Indian Reservation in the early 1980s. Ricoposciuto claims his crew of computer programmers helped customize PROMIS there for banking and other uses. He is now serving 80 years in a South Carolina federal prison ostensibly on drug charges. Though maybe not a credible source on his own, his story fits well with other sources.

Systematics' money-laundering role for the intelligence community might help explain why Jackson Stephens tried to take over Washington-based Financial General Bankshares in 1978 on behalf of Arab backers of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI's links to global corruption and intelligence operations have been well docu-mented, though many mysteries remain.

According to a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Stephens insisted on having then-tiny Systematics brought in to take over all of FGB's data processing. Representing Systematics in that 1978 SEC case: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webster Hubbell. Stephens was blocked in that takeover. But FGB, later renamed First American, ultimately fell under the alleged domination of BCCI through Robert Altman and former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. According to a technician who worked for First American in Atlanta, Systematics became a key computer contractor there anyway.

In the 1980s, Systematics' business boomed. When it first sold stock to the public in 1983, revenues were $64 million. That had risen to $230 million by the time Stephens arranged Systematics' sale to Alltel Corp., a telephone holding company which then moved its headquarters to Little Rock. Last year, Systematics sales hit $861 million - a third of Alltel's total. Stephens now owns more than 8 percent of Alltel and wields significant influence over the company.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, bringing Foster, Hubbell and Kennedy to the White House staff, Systematics' foreign bank business flourished. It began to announce a flood of data processing deals with major banks in Moscow, Maoso, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Trinidad and elsewhere. According to veteran bank software vendors, and computer intelligence specialist Wayne Madsen, co-author of a book about the NSA called "The Puzzle Palace", it is inconceivable any U.S. company could land such lucrative work without the intimate participation of the NSA. Domestic business took off as well, with giants like Citibank and NationsBank signing big data processing deals.

Working alongside Systematics in this spooky world of bank computer spying appears to be a cluster of other curious, loosely-affiliated companies. For instance, there is Boston Systematics, headed by former CIA officer Harry Wechsler, who controls two Israeli companies that also use the name Systematics. Wechsler denies any connection to the Arkansas company (now named Alltel Information Services) and claims to know nothing of PROMIS. Odd, then, that Inslaw claims it got two inquiries in 1987 from Wechsler's Israeli company seeking marketing data on PROMIS.

Many of the intelligence sources who provided information for this story insist that Boston Systematics and the Arkansas company are, in fact, related in some way. And based on his own source in the Justice Department, Inslaw's founder William A. Hamilton says he believes Boston Systematics was also closely linked with both Maxwell and Rafi Bitan, the former head of Israel's anti-terrorism effort. Hamilton says Bitan, using a false name, showed up at Inslaw's Washington, DC office one day in 1983 for a private demonstration of PROMIS.

Another curious company is Arkansas Systems, founded in 1974 by Systematics employee and formerly U.S. Army "analyst" John Chamberlain, located just down the road from Systematics. Arkansas Systems specializes in computer systems for foreign wire transfer centers and central banks. Among its clients: Russia and China, according to Arkansas Systems president James K. Hendren, a physicist formerly involved with the Safeguard anti-missile system. Arkansas Systems was one of the first com-panies to receive funding from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), an agency created by Bill Clinton that is now coming under Congressional scrutiny.

What does Alltel have to say about all of this? "I've never heard anything so asinine in all my life," steams Joe T. Ford, Alltel's chairman and the father of Jack Stephen's chief administrative aide.

John Stouri, a former IBM executive who is chief executive of Alltel Information Services, says he had never heard of Boston Systematics before this inquiry. He declares that the Arkansas company does almost no work for the government, scoffs at the idea his company is tied to the NSA and says Foster has never had any connection to Systematics. As for the fact he sold half his 700,000 Alltel shares in February at $34, just before it began skidding to under $24, he says that was merely to pay for the exercise of options.

Why is it then that Hamilton claims sources in two separate intelligence agencies say documents relating to Systematics were among those taken from Foster's office immediately after Foster's death? Indeed, a private investigator close to the continuing "Whitewater" probe by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr says he has learned that Hubbell has delivered those documents - including papers related to Systematics - to Starr. Hubbell pleaded guilty last December to two felony counts related to over-billing at the Rose Law Firm and has been sentenced to 21 months in prison.

If Foster knew the U.S. was spying on foreign banks, why would he let himself be caught red-handed with a Swiss bank account? The answer may be that the Israeli transactions were, in fact, well concealed, according to the veteran CIA source. And Foster would have known that, unless a prober knew exactly what to look for, finding his payoffs in the torrent of routine wire transfer data would be a hopeless task. Besides that, greed could explain a lot, if not Foster's then for whomever else he might have been playing bagman. The CIA source says Foster was not the only one in the White House under suspicion for peddling state secrets.

All of which helps explain Foster's odd behavior before his death. He was a tough, smart trial attorney at the peak of power in Washington. Only 48 years old, he was in excellent health. Suddenly, according to the Fiske report, he couldn't sleep. He complained of heart palpitations and high blood pressure. His sister arranged for him to see a Washington psychiatrist, who later told the FBI he had been instructed not to take notes because Foster's depression was "directly related to highly sensitive and confidential matters" tied to his "top secret" government work.

Foster never saw a shrink. Instead, about a week before he died, he hired a lawyer: high-powered DC criminal attorney and political fix-it man James Hamilton. Foster's wife claims his reason was the White House Travel Office controversy, which was expected to lead to congressional hearings.

On the weekend of July 17 and 18, Foster drove with his wife to the eastern shore of Maryland to relax. By "coincidence", according to the Fiske report, so did Hubbell. They met at the posh estate of Michael Cardozo, head of Clinton's legal defense fund and son-in-law of prominent Democratic fund raiser Nathan Landau. Hubbell later claimed the weekend was a laid-back gathering of tennis and poolside chit-chat.

But according to sources connected to the CIA, Justice Department and another intelligence agency, the meeting was under surveillance. The agenda? Heavy duty damage control. Foster was grilled. To whom else could the Swiss money be traced? How could the scandal be contained?

Foster's wife admitted he returned to Washington even more depressed. On Monday night, he turned down an invitation by the President to drop by the White House to supposedly watch a movie. On Tuesday, Foster left his office at the White House about 1 p.m. and said he'd be back later. At 5:45 p.m., his body was found neatly laid out at Fort Marcy Park, a bullet wound in his mouth. Suicide, the Fiske report promptly declared, echoed by a cursory (Democrat-run) Senate inquiry. Still, nagging questions remain: Why was there no blood on the ground, no bone fragments or brain tissue? Why were there rug fibers all over the clothes? Why no dust on his shoes despite the long dirt path from his car to his body?

The answer seems painfully clear; a cover-up of immense proportions for reasons of "national security". And don't expect Whitewater prober Kenneth Starr to spill any beans. He was in-house counsel to Reagan Attorney General William French Smith at the time the Inslaw PROMIS software was expropriated for intelligence use. Later, as Solicitor General, he recused himself from an Inslaw-related matter without explanation. It seems likely Starr would have been personally involved in launching the covert bank spy effort, which Washington is still so nervous to keep secret.

All in the family, you might say. 

Reed Irvine of "Accuracy in Media" and Chris Ruddy on the Vincent Foster Assassination 

from Spike EP on Vimeo.

"Panelists discussed their theories on the death of Vincent Foster. Mr. Foster was White House Counsel when he was found dead of an apparent suicide in the spring of 1993. The panelists believe there is sufficient evidence to show that Mr. Foster’s death was a murder. Following their presentations, panelists took questions from the audience."

Skull & Bones

Ron Rosenbaum - Esquire Magazine - September, 1977

Take a look at the hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they call it a tomb. It's the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. For nearly a century and a half, Skull and Bones has been the most influential secret society in the nation, and now it is one of the last. In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be concealed about anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank tombstone walls could be holding the last secrets left in America. 

You could ask Averell Harriman whether there's really a sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce (Time magazine) lay down naked in the coffin and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to 14 fellow Bonesmen. You could ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart if there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a skeleton suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside the tomb. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pie as part of his initiation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. 

You could ask Bill Bundy or William F. Buckley, both of who went into the CIA after leaving Bones - or George Bush, who ran the CIA / President - whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. ("Spook," the Yale slang for spy.) 

You could ask J. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it's true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security for life. 

You could ask...but I think you get the idea. 

The lending lights of the Eastern establishment - in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman pays Bone's tax bill), in a blue-blood law firms (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment - the people who have shaped America's national character since it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in that crypt over there. 

Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class, called his experience in the tomb the most profound one in his entire education. But none of them will tell you a thing about it. 

They've sworn an oath never to reveal what goes on inside and they're legendary for the lengths to which they'll go to avoid prying interrogation. The mere mention of the words "skull and bones" in the presence of a true-blue Bonesman, such as Blackford Oakes, the fictional hero of Bill Buckley's spy thriller, 'Saving the Queen', will cause him to "dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed." 

I can trace my personal fascination with the mysterious goings- on in the sepulcher across the street to a spooky scene I witnessed on its shadowy steps late one April night eleven years ago.

I was then a sophomore at Yale, living in Jonathan Edwards, the residential college (anglophile Yale name for dorm) built next to the Bones tomb. It was part of Jonathan Edwards folklore that on a April evening following "tap night" at Bones, if one could climb to the tower of Weir Hall, the odd castle that overlooks the Bones courtyard, one could hear strange cries and moans coming from the bowels of the tomb as the fifteen newly "tapped" members were put through what sounded like a harrowing ordeal. 

Returning alone to my room late at night, I would always cross the street rather than walk the sidewalk that passed right in front of Bones. Even at that safe distance, something about it made my skin crawl. 

But that night in April I wasn't alone; a classmate and I were coming back from an all-night diner at about two in the morning. At the time, I knew little about the mysteries of Bones or any of the other huge windowless secret-society tombs that dominated with dark authority certain key-corners of the campus. They were nothing like conventional fraternities. No one lived in the tombs. 

Instead, every Thursday and Sunday night the best and the brightest on campus, the fifteen seniors in Skull and Bones and in the Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, Wolf's Head, Berzelius, in all the seven secret societies, disappeared into their respective tombs and spent hours doing something - something they were sworn to secrecy about. And Bones, it was said was the most ritualistic and secretive of all. 

Even the very door to the Bones tomb, that huge triple-padlocked iron door, was never permitted to open in the presence of an outsider.

All this was floating through my impressionable sophomore mind that night as my friend Mike and I approached the stone pylons guarding the entrance to Bones. Suddenly we froze at the sight of a strange thing lying on the steps. 

There in the gloom of the doorway on the top step was a long white object that looked like the thighbone of a large mammal. I remained frozen. Mike was more adventuresome: he walked right up to the steps and picked up the bone. I wanted to get out of there fast; I was certain we were being spied upon from a concealed window. 

Mike couldn't decide what to do with the bone. He went up to the door and began examining the array of padlocks. 

Suddenly a bolt shot. The massive door began to swing open and something reached out at him from within. He grasped, terrified, and jumped back, but not before something clutched the bone, yanked it out of his hand and back into the darkness within. The door slammed shut with a clang that rang in our ears as we ran away. 

Recollected in tranquility, the dreamlike gothic moment seems to me an emblem of the strangeness I felt at being at Yale, at being given a brief glimpse of the mysterious workings of the inner temples of privelege but feeling emphatically shut out of the secret ceremonies within. I always felt irrelevant to the real purpose of the institution, which was from its missionary beginnings devoted to converting the idle progeny of the ruling class into morally serious leaders of the establishment. It is frequently in the tombs that conversions take place. 

NOVEMBER, 1976: SECURITY MEASURES 

It's night and we're back in front of the tomb, Mike and I, reinforced by nine years in the outside world, two skeptical women friends and a big dinner at Mory's. And yet once again there is an odd, chilling encounter. We're re-creating that first spooky moment. I'm standing in front of the stone pylons and Mike has walked up to stand against the door so we can estimate its height by his. 

Then we notice we're being watched. 

A small red foreign car has pulled up on the sidewalk a few yards away from us. The driver has been watching us for some time. Then he gets out. He's a tall, athletic looking guy, fairly young. He shuts the card door behind him and stands leaning against it, continuing to observe us. We try to act oblivious, continuing to sketch and measure. 

The guy finally walks over to us, "You seen Miles?" he asks. We look at each other. Could he think we're actually Bones alumni, or is he testing us? Could "You seen Miles?" be some sort of password? 

"No," we reply. "Haven't seen Miles." 

He nods and remains there. We decide we've done enough sketching and measuring and stroll off. "Look!" one of the women says as she turns and points back. 

"He just ran down the side steps to check the basement-door locks. He probably thought he caught us planning a break-in." I found the episode intriguing.

What it said to me was that Bones still cared about the security of its secrets. Trying to find out what goes on inside could be a challenge. And so it was that I set out this April to see just how secure those last secrets are. It was a task I took on not out of malice or sour grapes. I was not tapped for a secret society so I'm open to the latter charge, but I plead guilty only to the voyeurism of a mystery lover. I'd been working on a novel, a psychological thriller of sorts that involved the rites of Bones, and I thought it wouldn't hurt to spend some time in New Haven during the week of tap night and initiation night, poking around and asking questions. 

You could call it espionage if you were so inclined, but I tried to play the game in a gentlemanly fashion: I would not directly ask a Bonesman to violate his sacred oath of secrecy. If, however, one of them happened to have fudged on the oath to some other party and that the other party were to convey the gist of the information to me, I would rule it fair game. And if any Bonesman wants to step forward and add something. I'll be happy to listen. 

What follows is an account of my search for the meaning behind the mysterious Bones rituals. Only information that might be too easily traced to its source has been left out, because certain sources expressed fear of reprisals against themselves. Yes, reprisals. One of them even insisted, with what seemed like deadly seriousness, that reprisals would be taken against me. 

"What bank do you have your checking account at?" this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual. I named the bank, "Aha," said the party. "There are three Bonesmen on the board. You'll never have a line of credit again. They'll tap your phone. They'll..." 

Before I could say, "A line of what?" the source continued: "The alumni still care. Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every level of power in the country. You'll see - it's like trying to look into the Mafia. Remember, they're a secret society, too." 

WEDNESDAY NIGHT, APRIL 14: THE DOSSIER 

Already I have in my possession a set of annotated floor plans of the interior of the tomb, giving the location of the sanctum sanctorum, the room called 322. And tonight I received a dossier on Bones ritual secrets that was compiled from the archives of another secret society. 

It seems that one abiding preoccupation of many Yale secret societies is keeping files on the secrets of other secret societies, particularly Bones. 

The dossier of Bones is a particularly sophisticated one, featuring "reliability ratings" in percentiles for each chunk of information. It was obtained for me by an enterprising researcher on the condition that I keep secret the name of the secret society that supplied it. 

Okay I will say, though, that it's not the secret society that is rumored to have Hitler's silverware in its archives. 

That's Scroll and Key, chief rival of Bones for the elite of Yale - Dean Acheson and Cy Vance's society - and the source of most of the rest of the American foreign policy establishment. 

But to return to the dossier. 

Let me tell you what it says about the initiation, the center of some of the most lurid apocryphal rumors about Bones. According to the dossier, the Bones initiation ritual of 194O went like this: 

"New man placed in coffin - carried into central part of the building. New man chanted over and 'reborn' into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. (sic) A bone with his name on it is tossed into bone heap at start of every meeting. Initiates plunged into mud pile." 

THURSDAY EVENING: THE FILE AND CLAW SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERY OF 322 

I'm standing in the shadows across the street from the tomb, ready to tail the first person to come out. Tonight is tap night, the night fifteen juniors will be chosen to receive the one-hundred- forty-five-year-old secrets of Bones. Tonight the fifteen seniors in Bones and the fifteen in each of the other societies will arrive outside the rooms of the prospective tappees. They'll pound loudly on the doors. When the chosen junior opens up, a Bonesman will slam him on the shoulder and thunder: "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?" At that point, according to my dossier, if the candidate accepts, he will be handed a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed in black wax with the skull-and-crossbones emblem and the mystic Bones number, 322. The message appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night - next Tuesday - the first time the newly tapped candidate will be permitted inside the tomb. Candidates are "instructed to wear no metal" to the initiation, the dossier notes ominously. (Reliability rating for the stated to be one hundred percent.) Not long before eight tonight, the door to Bones swings open. Two dark-suited young men emerge. One of them carries a slim black attaché case.

Obviously they're on their way to tap someone. I decide that Bones initiates are taken to a ceremony somewhere near the campus before the big initiation inside the tomb. The Bonesmen head up High Street and pass the library, then make a right. Passing the library, I can't help but recoil when I think of the embarrassing discovery I made in the manuscript room this afternoon. The last thing I wanted to do was reduce the subtleties of the social function of Bones to some simpleminded conspiracy theory. And yet I do seem to have come across definite, if skeletal links between the origins of Bones rituals and those of the notorious Bavarian Illuminists. For me, an interested but skeptical student of the conspiracy world, the introduction of the Illuminists, or Illuminati, into certain discussions (say for instance, of events in Dallas in 1963) has become the same thing that the mention of Bones is to a Bonesman - a signal to leave the room. Because although the Bavarian Illuminists did have a real historical existence (from 1776 to 1785 they were an esoteric secret society within the more mystical freethinking lodges of German Freemasonry), they have also had a paranoid fantasy existence throughout two centuries of conspiracy literature. They are the imagined mega cabal that manipulated such alleged plots as the French and Russian revolutions, the elders of Zion, the rise of Hitler and the House of Morgan. Yes the Bilderbergers and George De Mohrenschildt, too. Silly as it may sound, there are suggestive links between the historical if not mytho-conspiratorial, Illuminists and Bones. First consider the account of the origins of Bones to be found in a century-old pamphlet published by an anonymous group that called itself File and Claw after the tools they used to pry their way inside Bones late one night. I came upon the File and Claw break-in pamphlet in a box of disintegrating documents filed in the library's manuscript room under Skull and Bone's corporate name, Russell Trust Association. The foundation was named for William H (later General) Russell, the man who founded Bones in 1832. I was trying to figure out what mission Russell had for the secret order he founded and why he had chosen that particular death-head brand of mumbo jumbo to embody his vision. 

Well, according to the File and Claw breaking crew, "Bones is a chapter of corps of a German university. It should properly be called the Skull and Bones chapter. General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his senior year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. The meaning of the permanent number 322 in all Bones literature is that it was founded in '32 as the second chapter of the German society. But the Bonesman has a pleasing fiction that his fraternity is a descendant of an old Greek patriot society founded by Demosthenes, who died in 322 BC." They go on to describe a German slogan painted "on arched walls above the vault" of the sacred room 322. The slogan appears above a painting of skulls surrounded by Masonic symbols, a picture said to be "a gift of the German chapter." "Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich," the slogan reads, or, "Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death." Imagine my surprise when I ran into that very slogan in a 1798 Scottish anti-Illuminatist tract reprinted in 1967 by the John Birch Society. The tract (proofs of a conspiracy by John Robinson) prints alleged excerpts from Illuminist ritual manuals supposedly confiscated by the Bavarian police when the secret order was banned in 1785.

Toward the end of the ceremony of initiation in the "Regent degree" of Illuminism, according to the tract, "a skeleton in pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'". Doesn't that sound similar to the German slogan the File and Claw team claims to have found inside Bones? Now consider a haunting photograph of the altar room of one of the Masonic lodges at Nuremburg that is closely associated with Illuminism. Haunting because at the altar room's center, approached through the aisle of hanging human skeletons, is a coffin surmounted by - you guessed it - a skull and crossed bones that look exactly like the particular arrangement of jawbones and thighbones in the official Bones emblem. The skull and crossbones was the official crest of another key Illuminist lodge, one right-wing Illuminist theoretician told me. Now you can look at this three ways. One possibility is that the Bircher right - and the conspiracy-minded left are correct: The Eastern establishment is the demonic creation of a clandestine elite manipulating history, and Skull and Bones is one of its recruiting centers. A more plausible explanation is that the death's-head symbolism was so prevalent in Germany when the impressionable young Russell visited that he just stumbled on the same mother lode of pseudo-Masonic mummery as the Illuninists. The third possibility is that the break-in pamphlets are an elaborate fraud designed by the File and Claw crew to pin the taint of Illuminism on Bones and that the rituals of Bones have innocent Athenian themes, 322 being only the date of the death of Demosthenes. (In fact, some Bones literature I've seen in the archives does express the year as if 322 BC were the year one, making 1977 anno Demostheni 2299.)

I am still following the dark-suited Bonesman at a discreet distance as they make their way along Prospect Street and into a narrow alley, which to my dismay, turns into a parking lot. They get into a car and drive off, obviously to tap an off-campus prospect. So much for tonight's clandestine work I'd never get to my car in time to follow them. My heart isn't in it anyway. I am due to head off to the graveyard to watch the initiation ceremony of Book and Snake, the secret society of Deep Throat's friend Bob Woodward (several Deep Throat theories have postulated Yale secret-society ties as the origin of Woodward's underground-garage connection, and two Bonesmen, Ray Price and Richard Moore, who weree high Nixon aides, have been mentioned as suspects - perhaps because of their experience at clandestine underground truth telling). And later tonight I hope to make the first of my contacts with persons who have been inside - not just inside the tomb, but inside the skulls of some of the Bonesmen.

LATER THURSDAY NIGHT: TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEXUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

In his senior year, each member of Bones goes through an intense two-part confessional experience in the Bones crypt. One Thursday night he tells his life story, giving what is meant to be a painfully forthright autobiography that exposes his traumas, shames, and dreams. (Tom Wolfe calls this Bones practice a fore-runner of the Me Decade's fascination with self.) The following Sunday-night session is devoted exclusively to sexual histories. They don't leave out anything these days. I don't know what it was like in General Russell's day, maybe there was less to talk about, but these days the sexual stuff is totally explicit and there's less need for fabricating exploits to fill up the allotted time. Most Sunday-night sessions start with talk of prep school masturbation and don't stop until the intimate details of Saturday night's delights have come to light early Monday morning. This has begun to cause some disruptions in relationships. The women the Bonesmen talk about in the crypt are often Yale co-eds and frequently feminists. While it might seem to be a rebuke to Bone's spirit of consciousness raising, none of these women is too pleased at having the most intimate secrets of her relationship made the subject of an all-night symposium consecrating her lover's brotherhood with fourteen males she hardly knows. As one woman put it, "I objected to fourteen guys knowing whether I was a good lay...It was like after that each of them thought I was his woman in some way." Some women have discovered that their lovers take their vows to Bones more solemnly than their commitments to women.

There is the case of the woman who revealed something very personal - not embarrassing, just private - to her lover and made him swear never to repeat it to another human. When he came back from the Bones crypt after his Sunday-night sex session, he couldn't meet her eyes. He'd told his brothers in Bones. It seems that the whole secret society system at Yale is in the terminal stages of a sexual crisis. By the time I arrived this April, all but three of the formerly all male societies had gone co-ed, and two of the remaining holdouts - Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head - were embroiled in bitter battles over certain members' attempts to have them follow the trend. The popular quarterback of the football team had resigned from Scroll and Key because its alumni would not even let him make a pro-coeducation plea to their convocation. When one prominent alumnus of Wolf's Head was told the current members had plans to tap women, he threatened to "raze the building" before permitting it. Nevertheless, it seemed as though it wouldn't be long before those two holdouts went co-ed. But not Bones. Both alumni and outsiders see the essence of the Bones experience as some kind of male bonding, a Victorian, muscular, Christian-missionary view of manliness and public service. While changing the least of all societies over its one hundred forty-five years. Bones did begin admitting Jews in the early Fifties and tapping blacks in 1949.

It offered membership to some of the most outspoken rebels of the late Sixties and more recently, added gay and bisexual members, including the president of the militant Gay Activist Alliance, a man by the name of Miles. But women, the Bones alumni have strenuously insisted, are different. When a rambunctious Seventies class of Bones proposed tapping the best and brightest of the new Yale women, the officers of the Russell Trust Association threatened to bar that class from the tomb and change the locks if they dared. They didn't. The sort of thing is what persuaded the person I am meeting with late tonight - and a number of other persons - to talk about what goes on inside: after all, isn't the core of the Bones group experience the betrayal of their loved ones' secrets? Measure for measure.

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It Got Them Killed (?): James Gandolfini ***SPECULATION***

Warning: 

I have no firm facts, and I have done no research on this specific topic beyond what is generally widely being reported. 

THIS IS IDLE SPECULATION ON MY PART.

That said,

I can think of no specific or compelling reason why anyone might want James Gandolfini dead.

He was popular, well-loved and well-liked and unlike many spooky, suspicious celebrity-sudden deaths at an early age, the outpourings of grief and mentions of respect have had the character of being general, spontaneous and sincere.

HOWEVER:

He was in Zero Dark Thirty last year - the Spookiest production in Hollywood History.

Along with Katheryn Bigelow and her screenwriter and senior cast, he undoubtably had the chance to hang out for extended periods with the CIA Officers detailed to liaise with the production.

Gandolfini is coached by his assigned CIA Case Officer 

(believed to be Special Assistant to Richard Blee)

He probably (almost certainly) died of natural causes - he was certainly a heavy man and the wrong side of 50.

But if there was anyone in Hollywood who came to know certain things they were never meant to know concerning the true nature of Operation Neptune Spear and the Hunt for Bin Laden...

It was probably Gandolfini.